Library Methods in the Home Counties

In a review of a Report on the Public Library System of London in the Summer, 1956, number (p. 419), I sought a picture of the London and Home Counties service and the factual details composing that picture. Every page of the Report baffled me, as I was bound to say most plainly, and library authorities' annual reports added little to my knowledge. It grieves me, a near‐cockney myself, that the libraries of Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Bristol, to name a few provincial towns, should make so much more impact on the public than London and the southeast. Not that London authorities are wholly inactive. Staffs there play happily around with issue methods. In one borough Dickman, once puffed up, goes out in favour of old tried and trusted Browne. In another a token has been experimentally in play, and is to be kept but not recommended to other authorities; a county, on the other hand, cannot restrain its enthusiasm; while a cautious town tokens only fiction—all most confusing. South of the river an authority has tested, approved and intends to remain devoted to photo‐charging; another, north of the river, has tried and rejected it. London always has been hospitable to eccentricity in librarianship. The kindness continues. Has one of these charging systems been investigated and costed by business experts?